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This article is from the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, March 1, 1994:
Befuddled PC Users Flood Help Llines, and No question Seems
To Be Too Basic

AUSTIN, Texas - The exasperated help-line caller said she couldn't get her
new Dell computer to turn on. Jay Ablinger, a Dell Computer Corp.
technician, made sure the computer was plugged in and then asked the
woman what happened when she pushed the power button.

"I've pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens," the woman
replied. "Foot pedal?" the technician asked. "Yes," the woman said, "this little
white foot pedal with the on switch." The "foot pedal," it turned out, was the
computer's mouse, a hand-operated device that helps to control the
computer's operation.

Personal-computer makers are discovering that it's still a low-tech world out
there. While they are finally having great success selling PCs to households,
they now have to deal with people to whom monitors and disk drives are as
foreign as another language.

"It is rather mystifying to get this nice, beautiful machine and not know
anything about it," says Ed Shuler, a technician who helps field consumer
calls at Dell's headquarters here. "It's going into unfamiliar territory," adds
Gus Kolias, vice president of customer service and training for Compaq
Computer Corp. "People are looking for a comfort level."

Only two years ago, most calls to PC help lines came from techies needing
help on complex problems. But now, with computer sales to homes exploding
as new "multimedia" functions gain mass appeal, PC makers say that as
many as 70% of their calls come from rank novices. Partly because of the
volume of calls, some computer companies have started charging help-line
users.

The questions are often so basic that they could have been answered by
opening the manual that comes with every machine. One woman called
Dell's toll-free line to ask how to install batteries in her laptop. When told
that the directions were on the first page of the manual, says Steve Smith,
Dell director of technical support, the woman replied angrily, "I just paid
$2,000 for this stupid thing, and I'm not going to read a book."

Indeed, it seems that these buyers rarely refer to a manual when a phone is
at hand. "If there is a book and a phone and they're side-by-side, the phone
wins time after time," says Craig McQuilkin manager of service marketing
for AST Research, Inc. in Irvine, Calif. "It's a phenomenon of people
wanting to talk to people.

And do they ever. Compaq's help center in Houston, Texas, is inundated by
some 8,000 consumer calls a day, with inquiries like this one related by
technician John Wolf: "A frustrated customer called, who said her brand
new Contura would not work. She said she had unpacked the unit, plugged it
in, opened it up and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to
happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power switch,
she asked, "What power switch?

Seemingly simple computer features baffle some users. So many people
have called to ask where the "any" key is when "Press Any Key" flashes on
the screen that Compaq is considering changing the command to "Press
Return Key.

Some people can't figure out the mouse. Tamra Eagle, and AST technical
support supervisor, says one customer complained that her mouse was hard
to control with the "dust cover" on. The cover turned out to be the plastic
bag the mouse was packaged in. Dell technician Wayne Zieschan says one
of his customers held the mouse and pointed it at the screen, all the while
clicking madly. The customer got no response because the mouse works
only if it's moved over a flat surface.

Disk drives are another bugaboo. Compaq technician Brent Sullivan says a
customer was having trouble reading word-processing files from his old
diskettes. After troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the
problem, Mr. Sullivan asked what else was being done with the diskette. The
customer's response: "I put a label on the diskette and rolled it into the
typewriter."

At AST, another customer dutifully complied with a technician's request that
she send in a copy of a defective floppy disk. A letter from the customer
arrived a few days later, along with a Xerox copy of the floppy. And at Dell,
a technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive
and "close the door." Asking the technician to "hold on," the customer put the
phone down and was heard walking over to shut the door to his room. The
technician meant the door to his floppy drive.

The software inside the computer can be equally befuddling. A Dell
customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything. After 40
minutes of troubleshooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to
fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting
the "send" key.

Another Dell customer needed help setting up a new program, so Dell
technician Gary Rock referred him to the local Egghead. "Yeah, I got me a
couple friends," the customer replied. When told Egghead was software
store, the man said, "Oh! I thought you meant for me to find couple of geeks.

Not realizing how fragile computers can be, some people end up damaging
parts beyond repair. A Dell customer called to complain that his keyboard no
longer worked. He had cleaned it, he said, filling up his tub with soap and
water and soaking his keyboard for a day, and the removing all the keys and
washing them individually.

Computers make some people paranoid. A Dell technician, Morgan
Vergaran says he once calmed a man who became enraged because, "his
computer has told him he was bad and an invalid." Mr. Vergara patiently
explained that the computer's "bad command" and "invalid" responses
shouldn't be taken personally.

These days PC-help technicians increasingly find themselves taking on the
role of amateur psychologists. Mr. Shuler, the dell technician who once
worked as a psychiatric nurse, says he defused a potential domestic fight by
soothingly talking a man through a computer problem after the man had
screamed threats at his wife and children in the background

There are also the lonely hearts who seek out human contact, even if it
happens to be a computer techie. One man from New Hampshire calls Dell
every time he experiences a life crisis. He gets a technician to walk him
through some contrived problem with his computer, apparently feeling
uplifted by the process.

"A lot of people want reassurance," says Mr. Shuler.